One of the UK’s leading statisticians says he is ‘no doubt’ the UK will be hit by a third wave of coronavirus infections.

The worrying prediction was made by Professor Sir Ian Diamond, head of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), who believes a spike in cases is likely by the autumn.

His comments come after England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said there were still risks to reopening society and the UK will experience another surge of cases at some point, potentially in late summer or through the autumn and winter.

Sir Ian said we need to understand how the data is moving forward and look at the impact of the “wonderful” vaccine rollout.

“But having said that, we need also to recognise that this is a virus that isn’t going to go away.

“And I have no doubt that in the autumn there will be a further wave of infections,” he told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One.

Sir Ian also warned there is a lot of regional variation in terms of how many people have antibodies.

Asked if it is too early to know how much of the fall in infection across the UK is down to the vaccine rollout, he said there are a number of moving parts such as vaccines and restrictions.

He added: “I mean I would say though that this has been an incredibly impressive vaccine rollout, and we’ve been looking at antibodies in the population, and we’ve been scaling up our survey in order to be able to take many more blood tests so that we can look at the impact.

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“And what we’re seeing is quite remarkable increases in the level of antibodies in the over-80s, and increasingly in the over-70s. So I’m very, very confident that the vaccine rollout is really starting to provide some real protection.

“At the other side we see very relatively high levels amongst young people which just shows how much of young people have been affected by the virus.

“I’d finally just say on this that there is a lot of regional variation, so we find 30% of London have antibodies whereas only 16% in the south-west, so we need to recognise that as well.”

Last week, Prof Whitty told MPs he expected Covid cases to rise again in the future, but said he was uncertain if this would be in the summer, autumn or winter.

He also rejected calls to ease lockdown faster saying a lot more people could die.

Modelling data considered by the Sage scientific panel has suggested that even under the most optimistic set of assumptions, at least a further 30,000 Covid-19 deaths could occur.

Prof Whitty told MPs: “What we are going to see is, as things are opening up, what all the modelling suggests is that at some point we will get a surge in virus,” he said.

“We hope it doesn’t happen soon, it might for example happen later in the summer if we open up gradually or because of the seasonal effect it might happen over the next autumn and winter.

“All the modelling suggests there is going to be a further surge and that will find the people who either have not been vaccinated or where the vaccine has not worked. “Some of them will end up in hospital and sadly some of them will go on to die.”